Lily Allen
The singer and actress who shot to fame with the number one hit “Smile” in 2006, and has since starred in her own TV show “Lily Allen and Friends” as well as West End Musicals, has long battled with quitting smoking.
Allen’s move to vaping coincided with her deal to be the face of Vype - a UK brand of vapes owned by tobacco major British American Tobacco - in 2019. “I’ve been a smoker for a long time now, and smoking and singing don’t go together particularly well, I need alternative”, she said at the time.
The move was not without consequences, as posts on Instagram showing her holding a vape were banned by the UK Advertising Standards Authority following a complaint backed by Action on Smoking and Health.
But on a personal level, the switch seems to have done Allen good: she suggested that she had stopped smoking for good in an interview earlier this year.
Slash
Lead guitarist of the rock band Guns N’ Roses, slash spoke about his struggle to quit smoking and his eventual success with snus on a Swedish radio station in 2009.
“When I first quit smoking, which was in 2009, pretty soon after that I discovered snus and it was like the best discovery in the world,” the 56-year-old guitar virtuoso said in an interview on Rockklassiker, Sweden’s largest hard rock radio station.
The rock legend explained that he had used snus for “years and years and years” after he quit smoking. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is the greatest!’,” he explained, adding that he used to have General Snus shipped to him from Sweden.
This wasn’t the first time Slash had told the world about his snus use. In a tweet from 2013 he talked about picking up a surplus of snus while he was in Stockholm.
Nick Clegg
The former UK Deputy Prime Minister, who is now a senior executive at Facebook in California, told the BBC in 2013 that he had finally given up smoking, despite once telling a radio show that if he were stuck on a desert island and could pick one luxury item, it would be a “stash of cigarettes”.
It later emerged that Clegg was using vapes in order to stay off the cigarettes. IN 2015 he told a radio phone-in that he felt “fit as a fiddle” after switching to vaping in early 2015. Clearly, that 2013 attempt didn’t go so well.
“I haven’t had what you call an old fashioned cigarette for weeks and weeks and weeks” he said at the time, although apparently he did reach for a pack after learning that he had led his party to a historic defeat in the 2015 general election.
Cheryl Cole
The star judge on both UK and US editions of the X-Factor talent show alongside fellow ex-smoker turned vaper Simon Cowell was advised by her voice coaches to give up smoking in 2011. “I miss smoking when I stop”, she said at the time, “it’s not cool to admit it, but I do”.
She has since appeared on several lists of aping celebrities across the internet, although she hasn’t given an interview on the part it played in her quitting journey.
